RE: Grounding Tenet for Learning

"...it utterly upends and subverts all our top-down traditional hierarchical approaches to instruction, in favor of a whole new approach committed and designed to inspire each student's innate instinct for learning."

John, All, I am in complete agreement with your passion and your statement that we need a whole new approach...

However, I think the GROUNDING TENET FOR LEARNING is less about 'inspiring' and more about MEETING, ACKNOWLEDGING AND RESPONDING to the actual fluctuations of learning-needs as they are occurring in our learners (therefore not eroding the inspiration they have). This is what I feel is missing. We can talk all day long about how to help our learners but in the final analysis if we want to engage learners at the DEEP level of their NATURAL learning natures (at the level nature has wired their ‘instinct for learning') we MUST develop systems that can respond to them on the living learning edge of how that deep learning really happens.

We wouldn't learn to swim in a desert. We need the real time feedback/pushback of the water. We wouldn't learn to walk in outer space. We need 'gravity' as a field to differentiate our movements.

We can't learn to learn by acquiring a map about how to - by adopting anyone else's 'steps' or model. We must learn to ever more presently participate in the flow of ambiguity within us - learning is a process of differentiation and disambiguation the central reference for which must come from within ourselves. Education must help us develop and calibrate our inner sensitivity and discernment of our own fluctuating learning needs. If it doesn't it teaches us to short circuit our millions of years in the evolving interior learning modalities and subordinate them to external, highly inefficient, artificial modes of learning. I am not saying we don't need the later - I am saying we need to learn our way into the mechanical learning from within our innate natural learning processes.

Our children learn to walk and talk by learning to sense ever more subtly their own interior signals - they learn to move in ways so as to not fall -  they learn to refine the inner compass they were born with.

When they enter the world of formal instruction (for the most part) they are placed in environments that ‘inspire' within them impulses of curiosity, uncertainty … ‘meaning needs'… yet unlike their natural learning in natural environments where following the direction of such needs (disambiguating them) is the center of their learning process, children in our educational environments learn that these needs are largely irrelevant to their learning. I estimate that the average child entering school today will have hundreds if not thousands of ‘meaning needs' for everyone they actually act on. Its not anyone's fault. We simply are systemically, due to our orientation, incapable of acknowledging and responding to their needs and consequently they tacitly learn to ignore them. (http://www.implicity.com/insidious.htm)

THIS IS WHAT MUST CHANGE

As it is, in the name of educating our children about things, we are unintentionally yet nonetheless pervasively, forcing our children to learn in environments in which their innermost most authentic fluctuating needs (the very needs we are ‘wired' to ever better tune into and learn through) are irrelevant - in the name of learning about things we are doing fundamental damage to the very core of their capacity for learning - the single most relevant process to everything about how they will live their lives.

 The grounding tenet - ‘respond to their learning needs so as to allow them to become more conscious of them' - that the first step in a system that could grow to help our children "learn to learn from the inside-out"

David Boulton
http://www.implicity.com